Butterflies Optional
by Malvolia
Summary: Fitz and Simmons individually reflect on the friendship transitioning in the penultimate scene of 2x22.


Simmons didn't know what she had expected after she told Fitz there might be something to discuss. Since his revelation almost a year ago that she was more than just a best friend to him, she had run through countless scenarios in her head. She had plotted out how she could have handled it better then, or what she could say about it now, but nothing was any more quantifiable between them. To be fair, she didn't know what she would have expected from the start of any romantic relationship.

Romantic. With Fitz. Oh, it sounded so ridiculous.

It wasn't as if she had never been attracted to anybody. There had been a quite good-looking professor she had a crush on at the Academy. (Fitz would try to see how often he could make her blush during those labs, with comments that would have seemed completely innocuous had the professor himself overheard them.) She had hidden a Captain America poster in the back of the closet of her room at SciOps. (Fitz found it when he went to get a blanket down from the top shelf one Friday night when they were binge-watching episodes of _Modern Marvels_. She had never lived that down. He had often threatened to tell Coulson she was ready to join his fan club.) Most recently, there had been Agent Triplett. (Fitz had never liked him, which never had made sense until... Well, the less said about one of the worst memories of her life, the better.) The point was, she had gotten butterflies in her stomach before, but never from her best friend.

Simmons was a scientist. She liked data and predictable results, and one reason that she had never gone further than prattling admiration for anyone was that very unpredictability. Despite the fairytale expectations of a long-awaited realization of mutual affection, real life was not that balanced. Real life threw confessions you weren't ready for at the worst possible time, leaving you feeling sick whenever you thought about them. Real life had months of not talking to somebody who meant more to you than anybody who wasn't a blood relation, months in which you ached over not being able to give him what he wanted to give to you.

And then Simmons saw Hunter watching Bobbi, wondering if she would wake up. Instantly, she flashed back to watching Fitz when he was in a coma for those nine terribly long days, and she recognized the emotion in Hunter's eyes. She had just never faced it before.

Maybe she had always loved Fitz, and not like she thought she had. Maybe this was exactly the way Fitz loved her, deeply and undramatically.

When he asked her to dinner, she wasn't swept off her feet. She'd had dinner with him hundreds of times—at his place and hers, with her parents and his, just the two of them in the lab or a pub. Dinner was nothing earth-changing. It felt...predictable. And profoundly _right._

Maybe she and Fitz could be more-than-best-friends and still stay best friends. Maybe if she couldn't imagine her life without him in it, that was a good place to start.

Maybe romance didn't always come with butterflies.

* * *

When Fitz heard that the Chitauri virus had infected Simmons, his stomach turned to lead, a lead that weaponized into desperate anger as he heard himself yelling at her: "You've been beside me the whole damn time." It was the first time he'd put it in words, how close they had become—the first time he'd actually noticed it. The lead turned back into a cold lump of fear. If she died, she would take half of him with her, and he wasn't sure he could survive that amputation.

When he didn't have to; when she was beside him again listening as he babbled about how he would have saved her, would've jumped out of the Bus right after her if Ward hadn't beat him to it; when she kissed him on the cheek reassuringly as she'd done many times before, the lead in his stomach turned to butterflies, and he didn't know which was worse. Because he couldn't be in love with his best friend. It would spoil everything.

But he was.

And it did.

He would never have had the courage to speak if he hadn't been facing imminent death. Would still not have spoken if he'd had the slightest inkling he might live through the oxygen deprivation. He woke up half a person, halved again when she left the team and only her echo remained to comfort him.

Why did he say the words that couldn't be taken back? Why couldn't they have stayed the same—FitzSimmons against the world, instead of each other?

She was braver than he was. Always had been. So it wasn't really a surprise that she was the one to fight her way back to the friendship he hadn't dared to believe was possible to restore. The surprise came when she reached tentatively over the line he had crossed what seemed like forever ago.

 _"There's nothing to discuss, Jemma."_

 _"Maybe there is."_

Even as he managed to focus on the job at hand, some corner of his mind whirled frantically around that exchange. What was his next move? What did you do when a sealed door swung open?

He flashed back to the box on the ocean floor, to Jemma kissing his face and clinging to him, and that wasn't it. What he wanted. He didn't want to push her, this time, corner her into giving what she thought he expected. He didn't need kisses and clinging. He wanted the casual touches, the hands on his shoulders. He wanted the sandwiches and the little notes and the _Doctor Who_ marathons. He wanted to be part of her life, however she needed him to be. And if she ever kissed him again, he wanted it to be something she wanted first, not something she bestowed out of pity.

Which brought him to the lab, and a dinner invitation to somewhere nice, for just the two of them. She looked surprised, but not overwhelmed. A good thing.

He left the room without looking back (though he desperately wanted to look back, to make sure she was real and he wasn't imagining her again). His stomach was a little leaden, and a little fluttery, and it felt like the continuation of something old and the start of something new.

He could get used to that feeling.


End file.
